Safari-related Security Exploit

DaveK filled us in on a recently reported security exploit related to Safari’s ‘Open “safe” files after downloading’ option (on the General tab in Safari Preferences). He recommended disabling that option.

Objective-See have an article with full details. The Conclusion section at the bottom describes their advice to Safari users.

Q&A

A member asked about dealing with spam emails she’s been receiving on her ISP e-mail account using macOS Mail. Members made the following recommendations:

Send an email you know to be spam to the Junk folder without opening the message by right clicking (or Ctrl-clicking) on it and selecting “Move to Junk”.

Prevent junk email senders from tracking if you open one of their messages by going to Mail Preferences and turning off the option “Load remote content in messages” on the “Viewing” tab. With this option disabled you may need to click the “Load remote content” button to load images in emails from trusted senders.

Make sure Mail’s own “Junk mail filtering” is enabled on the “Junk Mail” tab of preferences. You can choose to leave messages Mail identifies as Junk in your Inbox so you can see if it’s working.